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Post by Queen E on Apr 24, 2010 1:01:40 GMT -5
I'm thinking blinking would probably be a really bad idea...
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Post by beccaelizabeth on Apr 24, 2010 13:35:34 GMT -5
He made them scarier. Very good trick. I've had that nightmare about stuff coming out of the TV. For me it was cybermen. For a whole generation now it gets to be angels. :-)
I like the church vs angels thing, and a future with religion in it, and the no offence / quite a lot taken bit, because people always say 'no offence' when they mean 'I've been thoughtless and wish to avoid the consequences'. And the line about telling their families was that same thing, the Doctor avoids consequences. Which ties in to the Doctor's feelings about River Song ie run away, run away!. ... the more things change...
I like it that Amy is saying 'wife' because it ties in to her Stuff and it's what the fans say, so you get an in character 'is it ever that simple' 'yep' to play with.
I like River Song. I do not like River Song's eyeshadow. I do like that we keep getting little interesting bits, mostly in the guise of Funny, that are very probably Clues. And then the bit about prison, and the Doctor doesn't know yet who and what she is... oooh, clue clue!
... I love the bit with the TARDIS stabilisers. Because we do know he don't know how to drive it, we've seen, he's said, and now we see again *and* get a handy excuse for a smooth ride. 'Boring' though it may be :-) And then 'You leave the brakes on'. :-D :-D (It is a great noise though. Even though I was watching the subtitles and not listening to the Doctor right then. I have that to look forward to.)
There was many much funny in this one. I keep giggling to myself when I remember bits. And then the scary is hiding in the funny, as it should be.
There were bits in the middle where I thought the remix to new things ratio was a bit remixy, but then it sprang some rather excellent surprise under cover of babble, so it's basically made of win.
The best bit was the pacing. I forgot it was a two parter. I was watching it and it was all made of good bits and they all lead on to the next bit so you're busy watching and then ... the credits... ?! It's the best pacing for a cliffhanger, that slightly outraged feeling where you want to see the next minute really a lot. Excellent.
PS: 'Hello Sweetie' :-D :-D :-D
... must icon ...
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Post by Lola m on May 9, 2010 19:24:08 GMT -5
Hallucinogenic lipstick and headless monks. Ha! “It’s how you keep score.” She is one clever clever companion, she is. “Hello sweetie.”  River Song! Dueling robberies!! Awesome!! “You might want to find something to hang on to.” Yeah, he’s not gonna successfully run away, is he? “Time travel. We keep meeting in the wrong order.” WEEPING ANGELS! Eeeeeeep!! **hides behind sofa** Amy asks all the fan questions, like “is River Song your wife”. Also? I love her saucy voice – “heel, boy”. Image of an angel becoming an angel?! EEEEEEEEEEP!! Don’t even blink. “Have you ever tried not blinking?” Clever clever clever Amy!! Froze the image on the static, not the Angel. “A needle in a haystack.” “A needle that looks like hay. A hay-like needle of death . . . in a haystack . . . of, uh, statues. No, yours is fine.”  Mystery of River Song, eh? Who is she, that he can’t know yet? Hmmmm? Angel did something to Amy. Did an image of the angel get into her eye somehow? Sacred Bob. HA! Ah ha ha ha ha!! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! They’re all weeping angels! EEEEEEEEE! Come and see? Um, don’t do it, sacred Bob! Don’t fall for the “come see this” ploy! Whoopsie. Too late. “I didn’t escape, sir. The angel killed me too.” **gets shivers** “What do you mean, the angel killed you?” “Snapped my neck, sir. Wasn’t as painless as I expected, but it was pretty quick, so that was something.” **gets more shivers** Amy!! Stone hand! Eeeep! He bit her!! HA! And the hand was a hallucination, so all the stone-like stuff was that she was experiencing, then? Why are the angels trying to make the Doctor mad? Because then he will defeat them, yes? ARGGGGGGGGGGGG!!! “One thing you don’t put in a trap” “what would that be sir” and THAT’S when my fucking DVR cuts out!! **flails** **goes and sets DVR to grab another instance of this ep, and adds more time to the next new ep too** **shakes fist at slight scheduling variances of all networks** |
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Post by beccaelizabeth on May 13, 2010 6:58:05 GMT -5
Why are the angels trying to make the Doctor mad? Because then he will defeat them, yes? Well you'd think the bad guys would know that by now, but it's possible they just cat and mousing. The last word is 'Me.' and then *bang* and then it's a cliffhanger |
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Post by Riff on May 27, 2010 3:41:46 GMT -5
He made them scarier. Very good trick. I've had that nightmare about stuff coming out of the TV. For me it was cybermen. For a whole generation now it gets to be angels. :-) I like the church vs angels thing, and a future with religion in it, and the no offence / quite a lot taken bit, because people always say 'no offence' when they mean 'I've been thoughtless and wish to avoid the consequences'. And the line about telling their families was that same thing, the Doctor avoids consequences. Which ties in to the Doctor's feelings about River Song ie run away, run away!. ... the more things change... I like it that Amy is saying 'wife' because it ties in to her Stuff and it's what the fans say, so you get an in character 'is it ever that simple' 'yep' to play with. I like River Song. I do not like River Song's eyeshadow. I do like that we keep getting little interesting bits, mostly in the guise of Funny, that are very probably Clues. And then the bit about prison, and the Doctor doesn't know yet who and what she is... oooh, clue clue! ... I love the bit with the TARDIS stabilisers. Because we do know he don't know how to drive it, we've seen, he's said, and now we see again *and* get a handy excuse for a smooth ride. 'Boring' though it may be :-) And then 'You leave the brakes on'. :-D :-D (It is a great noise though. Even though I was watching the subtitles and not listening to the Doctor right then. I have that to look forward to.) There was many much funny in this one. I keep giggling to myself when I remember bits. And then the scary is hiding in the funny, as it should be. There were bits in the middle where I thought the remix to new things ratio was a bit remixy, but then it sprang some rather excellent surprise under cover of babble, so it's basically made of win. The best bit was the pacing. I forgot it was a two parter. I was watching it and it was all made of good bits and they all lead on to the next bit so you're busy watching and then ... the credits... ?! It's the best pacing for a cliffhanger, that slightly outraged feeling where you want to see the next minute really a lot. Excellent. PS: 'Hello Sweetie' :-D :-D :-D ... must icon ... Excellent post. I agree with all you say (well, I'm not that bothered about the eyeshadow - anyway, who cares? her shoes were great!) Old High Gallifreyan, last seen in The Five Doctors. The Doctor (Pat Troughton): Not many people understand it nowadays. [with almost tangible smugness] Fortunately, I do. And now, hello sweetie! You are right about the pacing. From the first image the narrative of this episode drives forward, like a book you wouldn't even think of putting down. The mostly positive portrayal of the church is almost radical in the current climate. Father Octavian, the Bish, is a wonderful character (as we see even more in the next part). What is interesting about him and the clerics/soldiers is that they have military professionalism/pragmatism, but also the gentleness of (decent) priests. Also, I liked the alpha omega insignia; quite clever, that. BTW, you may remember that the classic series went through periods when the TARDIS (on the inside, at least) made no other noise when materialising but that same chiming sound River produced. |
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Post by Riff on May 27, 2010 3:55:23 GMT -5
Hallucinogenic lipstick and headless monks. Ha! ARGGGGGGGGGGGG!!! “One thing you don’t put in a trap” “what would that be sir” and THAT’S when my fucking DVR cuts out!! **flails** **goes and sets DVR to grab another instance of this ep, and adds more time to the next new ep too** **shakes fist at slight scheduling variances of all networks** Language! Although my own language at that point in the ep would have probably boiled water at twenty paces. You know what happened over here? After DW there is a wretched reality game show about selecting a girl to play Dorothy in a new West End production of The Wizard of Oz. It's hosted by a man who often verges on the pretentious, affected and irritating. Anyway, they chose to advertise this show at the end of Doctor Who, with a cartoon of this annoying chap on the screen. On top of Matt Smith's face. During his closing speech. There were almost 6,000 telephone complaints, and the BBC said they would never do such a thing on any drama program again. DW fans victorious! |
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Post by Riff on May 27, 2010 6:05:30 GMT -5
“I didn’t escape, sir. The angel killed me too.” **gets shivers** “What do you mean, the angel killed you?” “Snapped my neck, sir. Wasn’t as painless as I expected, but it was pretty quick, so that was something.” **gets more shivers** They are completely malevolent, aren't they? The Ring sequence of one coming out of the television (Moffat said he would give them a power in this ep that every child dreads a monster having - I imagine this is it!) was creepy, but this is just horrible. The Angel actually rips the neocortex from his brain and animates a "version" of his consciouness to communicate with the Doctor. Sacred Bob became Scared Bob, but now he's Angel Bob. It's still him, but it is the Angels as well. Nasty. As for the Headless Monks, I wonder what the Aplans, who had two heads, would call a group of clerics with only one head each? I'm just asking.  |
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Post by Riff on Jun 9, 2010 7:43:19 GMT -5
What an opening! The pacing in this episode is, as Becca has said, particularly effective, and in this pre-titles sequence it is well-nigh perfect. From the moment we see River’s frankly sensational shoes pounding down the corridors of the Byzantium in time to the soundtrack, any suggestion of “effort “ on the part of the viewer is gone. Sometimes it’s good to be simply picked up and carried along. The way the scenes of River’s superspy/superthief activities intercut with the more peaceful scenes in the Delerium Archive (the final resting place of the Headless Monks – more of that later), is delightful. The Doctor/Amy scenes build in energy until both elements dovetail together with River hurtling through the TARDIS doors. River is obviously younger than last time we saw her (though how much younger, we don’t know), and she has used her sexuality practically as a weapon on at least two men on the Byzantium. What a minx – I like her. A bond is very quickly established between her and Amy, initially based on mutually mocking the Doctor. But it becomes clear that she cares about Amy more than she might over someone she had just met. Has she met her before? I’ll talk about that in my write-up on Flesh and Stone. That business about materialising the TARDIS without “the noise” is amusing and does explain why (on the inside at least) it would often just make that chiming sound in the classic series, but is there more to it? Might it, perhaps, be a bit of foreshadowing to let the audience know that the Doctor can land silently if he wants to? At any rate, he’s a bit cross about all this, suddenly channelling the grumpy First Doctor: “You call that flying the TARDIS? Hah!” And River was taught by the very best on a day the Doctor was “busy”. I wonder who that might be? We’re soon introduced to the bishop Father Octavian and his clerics, each with a “sacred name” given to them in their service to the Church. Which church this is exactly, we don’t know, but all the language is drawn from Christianity, and the alpha omega design on their uniforms would seem to suggest the symbolism of Christ in Revelation. So this is the 51st century and the Church has moved on. Octavian discusses his prayers and (next episode) refers to God, so it is clear that the language used isn’t simply symbolic, ranks of a sort. We don’t know why, but the Church is now a military operation and everything in this episode suggests that it is a benevolent one. I can imagine Moffat smiling to himself as he wrote lines like, “Bishop, lock and load,” and “Verger, how are we doing with those explosives?” ;D Octavian in particular is a very positive character, morally good, gentle but stoically authoritative. At the start of the episode, Amy says they have been to a spaceship and Churchill’s bunker, but that now she wants to visit a planet. So there have been no adventures we haven’t seen at this point, then. In that case, how come she says to the Doctor, “You’re letting people call you ‘sir’. You never do that”? How does she know? For that matter, how did she know he was “very old” in The Beast Below? It might be nothing, but in this season you really never know. Is River a future wife of the Doctor, then? She might be, or it might be something more complex (or even something much darker, as is hinted at in the next episode). When Amy asks her what the Doctor is like in the future, she is strangely evasive: “The Doctor? The Doctor’s the Doctor.” There’s something a bit suspicious, there. Indeed, Octavian is convinced that the Doctor will not help them if he learns “who and what” she really is. We also learn she has no intention of “going back to prison”. The Aplans were a two headed species, always cheerful because they were “never short of a snog”. Then, however, laws against self-marriage appeared, “but then that’s the Church for you”. (Octavian responds with dignity to the Doctor’s comment. See Becca’s post above.) This throws up an interesting dilemma. Was the comment facetious? It may be there for balance, to temper a positive (or at least not negative) portrayal of religion with the fact that it can actually be quite unpleasant and bigoted. But if the comment is to be taken literally, there is a problem: Christianity is 5,000 years old in this episode, so the Aplans actually died out roughly 395,000 years before the death of Christ. How could the Church have influenced them, then? Unless some kind of time travel was involved. Human clerics only have one head, so might the Aplans have called them “Headless Monks”? And so, the Angels. The Doctor doesn’t beat about the bush when he describes them to Amy: “A Weeping Angel, Amy, is the deadliest, most powerful, most malevolent life form evolution has ever produced.” Through Octavian, we hear that the doctor has called the single Angel they believe they have to deal with at this point “an enemy of unknowable power and infinite evil”. Well, evil as a concept is infinite, but using “infinite” as an adjective makes the point that the word "evil" is not figurative here (as it usually is). That’s a big claim, but this story does a convincing job of portraying the Angels as genuinely evil beings. Such creatures would, to us, have to be totally alien, and they are. The “quantum lock” is, it seems, a strange reverse of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which subatomic particles only exist as mathematical abstract until they are observed, and then they “actualise” into material things. By contrast, when the weeping Angels are seen, it isn’t simply that they freeze into rock – they “literally cease to exist”. Thinking about it, that is more than just an interesting plot device; it’s weirdThen we have the issue of their image. As we see in the Ring sequence with Amy and the video recording, the appearance of an Angel is an extension of the Angel itself, so that it is somehow alive and present in a mere picture. This image ends up in Amy’s “eye” as her hallucinations of stone dust and a hand made of rock. We hear from the Doctor that “their image is their power,” hence their feebleness as formless statues. But why? Why should they resemble (to us, at least) stone Angels from late-Victorian cemeteries on Earth, and why should that appearance be so important? As the Doctor notes, the crash of the Byzantium was actually a rescue mission for the Angels trapped here (the exotic radiation from the split warpdrive feeds them, allows them to regain their image). They therefore have no need to displace people in time to feed on time energy (LOL – whatever that is supposed to be), and so they just break necks. They have no reason to do that, either, but they seem to enjoy it. But that’s nothing compared to Angel Bob, a truly horrifying idea. That these creatures can rip the cerebral cortex from the front of our brains and immediately use it to communicate, reanimating a “version” of the previous consciousness, is extraordinary and chilling. Such effortless control of something complex beyond our ability to comprehend really is alien. They can do this without any technology, it seems, and it appears that the only reason is to sadistically taunt the Doctor and the others: “I died of fear. You told me my fear would keep my alive, but I died afraid, in pain and alone. You made me trust you and, when it mattered, you let me down. Sorry, sir. The Angels were very keen for you to know that.” Somehow aspects of Bob’s personality are still present. Is “he” suffering at some level? It’s almost too hideous to think about. The book on the Angels is written by a madman, with a hole burnt through the centre of many of the pages. (A madman with a box? That would be an interesting twist). It asks, “What if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us? When these things occur and are held to be true, the time will be upon us, the time of Angels.” Yes, they are alien and they are evil. And I don’t like the sound of that passage one little bit. |
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Post by Lola m on Jun 11, 2010 21:09:04 GMT -5
What an opening! The pacing in this episode is, as Becca has said, particularly effective, and in this pre-titles sequence it is well-nigh perfect. From the moment we see River’s frankly sensational shoes pounding down the corridors of the Byzantium in time to the soundtrack, any suggestion of “effort “ on the part of the viewer is gone. Sometimes it’s good to be simply picked up and carried along. The way the scenes of River’s superspy/superthief activities intercut with the more peaceful scenes in the Delerium Archive (the final resting place of the Headless Monks – more of that later), is delightful. The Doctor/Amy scenes build in energy until both elements dovetail together with River hurtling through the TARDIS doors. River is obviously younger than last time we saw her (though how much younger, we don’t know), and she has used her sexuality practically as a weapon on at least two men on the Byzantium. What a minx – I like her. I like her too.  Heee! I know I would be giggling if I had a chance to write lines like that. Their "livingness", their themness, ceases to exist - yes? Which is very weird. Particularly, I think, the fact that this is true even of them seeing each other. Which came first? The chicken or the egg Angel or the statue? ;D |
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Post by Sue on Jan 6, 2011 9:55:44 GMT -5
What an opening! As the Doctor notes, the crash of the Byzantium was actually a rescue mission for the Angels trapped here (the exotic radiation from the split warpdrive feeds them, allows them to regain their image). They therefore have no need to displace people in time to feed on time energy (LOL – whatever that is supposed to be), and so they just break necks. They have no reason to do that, either, but they seem to enjoy it. Riff -- I'm enjoying all of your comments/analyses on these episodes. This part particularly answers a question I was going to ask. As creepy as the Angels were in the original episode the worst they did was send you back in time. Possibly a fate worse than death in that you lose everything but are alive to know it -- although for some it's more a chance to start over. But I kept wondering why now they were killing people and/or taking them over. I guess I missed the explanation. |
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Post by Sue on Jan 6, 2011 10:07:44 GMT -5
What an opening! As the Doctor notes, the crash of the Byzantium was actually a rescue mission for the Angels trapped here (the exotic radiation from the split warpdrive feeds them, allows them to regain their image). They therefore have no need to displace people in time to feed on time energy (LOL – whatever that is supposed to be), and so they just break necks. They have no reason to do that, either, but they seem to enjoy it. Riff -- I'm enjoying all of your comments/analyses on these episodes. This part particularly answers a question I was going to ask. As creepy as the Angels were in the original episode the worst they did was send you back in time. Possibly a fate worse than death in that you lose everything but are alive to know it -- although for some it's more a chance to start over. But I kept wondering why now they were killing people and/or taking them over. I guess I missed the explanation. And, again quoting myself because, even tho the comment is there to read it's not listed on the front page or the front Dr. Who page, even after I modified it to try to get it register. |
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